Auswärtssieg!

geschrieben für “Auswärtssieg!” von Jonas Hanson aus Schweden, der in seinem Schalke-Blog den Köngisblauen aus der nordischen Ferne huldigt. Sicher freut er sich über Kommentare (und Einladungen ;-)

It’s not easy to start writing a text, isn’t it? I’ve written articles about Schalke 04 for almost 2,5 years now, but it’s still tough to know how to begin. Nowadays I write in a blog called “Deutschlands Chelsea? Nein!”, but earlier I was on a bigger website. Enough about that, this post is mainly going to be about my relationship with Schalke, as a fan from Sweden. How is it to be a fan to a football club far away from your town?

I don’t know why I became a Schalke fan. I’ve checked the squad from the time I had my first Schalke memories (about 2000?), but I couldn’t see any players that attracted me. Maybe it was the color? The mystery about the two numbers, 04? The fact that they had a Danish striker called Sand? No, none of that. It has now gone eight years and I still don’t remember why I “choose” Schalke. Maybe it was just love…

I wasn’t a hardcore Schalke fan at the beginning, I didn’t looked up what was going on in the club but if anybody asked me what I knew about Germany, I said “Schalke is a great team”. At my first German lesson (In Sweden, we choose to read a language when we get 12 years old. The most common languages you can choose are German, French, Spanish and also Italian. Everybody reads English, of course.) we were going to try to pronounce the numbers in German. When we got to four, my friend said “Well, isn’t that team in Germany pronounced Schalke [null fir]?”. My answer? “No, it’s Schalke [null fynf]”. You can understand that I was pretty surprised when my teacher told me that I was wrong and my friend was right, I had pronounced the team name wrong! But it wasn’t easy to know that, I’ve never heard a story about Schalke on the news.

As I said, I used to write for a pretty big fan website, but nowadays I have my blog where I can write much more “free”. In the beginning for 2,5 years ago, all I cared about was the results in the games and Silly Season. After a while, though, I started to take interest in other things like the fans, the players that actually was already in the club etc. After a time together with another Swedish Schalke fan named Hupps (well, it’s his nickname, we haven’t started to give our babies weird Hollywood names. Yet.). I found that the fans where so relaxed and that things like an anecdote about Mike Büskens could be at least as interesting as a new player from Kaiserslautern.

I haven’t really answered the question about how it is to be a Swedish Schalke fan, have I? Of course, with today’s Internet it’s almost as easy to find news from Sweden as it is for a German guy. The big difference is that, despite the fact that I studied German for 4-5 years, I must translate all the German news into English through a translation program, ex. Babelfish. It’s not that I don’t understand German, but it takes twice as long time for me to translate it from German to Swedish “with my brain” than with English Babelfish.

If Internet didn’t exist it would have been much harder. Swedish media never reports anything about German football, and when it does, it’s about Bayern München or maybe Marcus Rosenberg. I think I’ve seen like 3-4 articles about Schalke this summer, three of them where about Sören Larsen (who played in Sweden before, in Djurgården) moving to Frankfurt/Toulouse, the other article was about Engelaar, but that article was only there because of the fact that Everton and Newcastle also had interest in him. English (and also Spanish) football is huge in Sweden, but I have no idea why Swedish people don’t care about Bundesliga. If you’re really, really lucky, a channel called Viasat Sport send one Bundesliga match per week. I think that Swedish media prioritize football something like this:

1. Allsvenskan (Male, Swedish first division)
2. Premier League
3. La Liga
4. Damallsvenskan (Female, Swedish first division)
5. Serie A
6. Superettan (Male, Swedish second division)
7. Ligue 1
8. Eredivise, Bundesliga

I don’t know the real answer why it is like that. If you look geographic, Bundesliga should be at least top-5 in Sweden, but no. One of the answers maybe is the prejudice that Bundesliga is boring, that the football is mainly “kick-and-run”. The only thing to solve the problem maybe is that the national team starts to play football á la Russia?…

I don’t know what more you want to have answered. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to leave a comment. I will check the comments once in a while to see if there is anything that needs to be answered. Until we meet at Arena AufSchalke, have a nice time and don’t get into fights with too many Doofmunders. Kein hasse, nur liebe für mein verein, Schalke.

And remember…. Immer attacke!

Geschrieben am Tuesday, 15. July 2008 um 19:04 und ist zu finden in Allgemein, FC Schalke 04.Du kannst die Antworten zu diesem Thema verfolgen unter RSS 2.0 feed.Du kannst Antwort, oder trackback von deiner Seite.